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ADDRESS 


BEFORE THE 


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MASSACHUSETTS 


Charitable Hlecjjanic H^ria&n, 


AT THEIR 


NINTH EXHIBITION 

SEPTEMBER 26 , 1860 . 


BY EMORY WASHBURN.I ?««-' ?11 

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BOSTON: 

PRINTED BY GEO. C. RAND AND AVERY. 
NO. 3 CORNHILL. 

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Boston, Sept. 27 , 1860 . 

Dear Sir: At a meeting of the Board of Managers of the Ninth Exhibition of the 
Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association, held this day, the undersigned were 
appointed a committee to express to you the thanks of the Board for the excellent, prac¬ 
tical, and instructive Address delivered before the members of the Association, and their 
guests, at Mechanics Hall, last evening, and to request a copy of the same for publication. 

It affords us great pleasure to communicate this expression of thanks by the Board, 
and to add thereto our personal gratification for the service rendered to our Association, 
and the cause of mechanical industry. 

Yours, etc. 

Feed. H. Stimpson, 

W. W. Whieldon, 

OSMYN BEEWSTER. 

Hon. Emory Washburn, Cambridge. 


Cambridge, Oct. 6. 

Gentlemen: Your kind note requesting a copy of the Address I had the honor to 
deliver before the Mechanic Association has been received. 

It gives me great pleasure to know that it was favorably received, for my respect for 
the body of gentlemen I wa3 to address made me particularly anxious to comply with 
their wishes. 

I shall cheerfully place the manuscript in your hands, to do with it as you think 
proper. 

Very respectfully, your obt. svt. 

Emory Washburn. 

F. H. Stimpson, W. W. Whieldon, Osmyn Brewster, Esqrs. 








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ADDRESS. 


Gentlemen of the Mechanic Association :— 

If the occasion, on which we are assembled, were designed for 
instruction in some of the departments of science or art, to 
which you have devoted your special study and attention, I should 
feel that I was little better than an intruder upon your kind¬ 
ness, in attempting to comply with the invitation to address you 
at this time. It would be far more fitting that I should ex¬ 
change plans with almost any one who hears me, than to tax 
your attention with thoughts which must be drawn from beyond 
the pale of a practical artisan life. 

But if the field of a common humanity is open before us, there 
must be topics enough on which to dwell, on an occasion so full 
of interest, without limitiug ourselves to the technical details of 
any trade or profession. Your association is based upon the 
affinities of common interests and pursuits, but your relations, 
as its members, with the world around you, are none the less 
intimate by reason of that connection. You have high aims to 
reach, noble purposes to fulfil, and solemn duties to perform, and 
will, I doubt not, bear patiently with one who, with honest pur¬ 
pose, asks you to lay aside, for a few moments, the specific 
objects for which you have associated yourselves, and to consider 
some of the broader relations which you and the arts in which you are 
engaged , hold to the social and political condition of the world around 
you. 

In treating a theme like this, I can only hope to employ 
familiar illustrations, without aiming at learning or original 



6 


thought. Every one, as he looks upon the world, sees that it is 
constantly changing. And, the more he reads of history, the 
more his curiosity is awakened to trace the causes which have 
been at work in producing the revolutions which he remarks in 
the social and political condition of men and nations. 

It is common, for instance, to speak of England as a nation of 
shop-keepers. And yet if we go back but a few generations, we 
find her a nation of half-barbarous warriors and husbandmen 
and slaves, without trade and without commerce. Liverpool had 
scarce a place upon the map, and the fox was burrowing in what 
is now the market-place of Manchester, while Friar Tuck and 
Robin Hood were the representatives of the idle and lawless 
men who lived and preyed upon the little industry and less thrift 
that half redeemed the island from barbarism. 

These changes, moreover, have been so great and so rapid, 
that we can only measure them by epochs and eras. The period 
of a single life is too full of incident to be repeated without our 
becoming weary in the detail. Within a few days, an ovation 
has been offered to the last survivor of that gallant band who, 
at Bunker Hill, fought the first great battle of our Revolution, 
who had, four years ago, passed his climacteric of a hundred 
years. 

The mind is almost bewildered by the recollections that crowd 
upon it, of the great events and revolutions which have marked 
the period of this single life. But it is only necessary to go 
back less than four such lives, to find this western continent 
itself a blank, with the human mind, in the old world, waiting in 
torpid inactivity, for the development of some of those great in¬ 
ventions and discoveries which mark the fifteenth century, to 
rouse it to action. 

The condition of the people in our own father land, was in 
harmony with the ignorance and debasement into which the 


7 


nations of the continent had so long been sunk. The laborer in 
agriculture was the slave of a feudal master, and, as if to cut off 
every chance of escape from a servitude so galling, statutes were 
enacted whereby a man who had not rents or lands of twenty 
shillings income (some fifteen or twenty pouunds of our day), 
was not permitted to put his son as an apprentice to any trade, 
but required him to be brought up to husbandry. Everything in 
the kingdom was in keeping with such a condition of labor. Only 
here and there, was found any one sufficiently intelligent to read 
or write; while, in the matter of social refinement or personal 
comfort, the people were, if possible, in a worse condition. The 
peasant houses of England were mere mud cottages; nor were 
those of the better classes scarcely less squalid. Chimneys, 
even, did not come into use till a century after the period of 
which I am speaking. As late as the middle of the sixteenth 
century there were only two coaches in all France; and when, 
at the close of the fifteenth, Margaret, the daughter of Henry VII. 
of England, married James of Scotland, she made her entry into 
Edinburgh upon a pillion, riding behind the king. 

These may be thought to be trifling incidents, but they serve 
to show the state of advance of a country whose lands had 
scarcely begun to be cultivated, and whose highways, all but im¬ 
passable at best, were infested by banditti and highwaymen. 

But what renders even this picture of social life more revolt¬ 
ing, is the arbitrary links which separated the ranks and condi¬ 
tions of the people. The toiling masses had so long been 
accustomed to the supercilious pride of the nobles and favored 
classes, that abject dependence had come to be the normal state 
of labor. And yet the haughty baron, ignorant and besotted, 
kept state in his comfortless castle, in gross and disgusting 
revels, with less of comfort in his domestic appointments around 
him, than are met with in the dwellings of the humblest me¬ 
chanics in our land. 


8 


It was not, let me repeat, so much that the houses of England 
of the fifteenth century were squalid, and her people destitute 
of the comforts of our day, that makes that period in her history 
so gloomy in the retrospect, as it was that her masses were born, 
grew up, lived and died in a condition of servitude and moral 
degradation. It was not that, as late as Elizabeth, the Queen, 
alone, in all the realm, was possessed of a pair of silken hose, 
but it was that the sandalled heel of a haughty aristocracy was 
upon the necks of the serfs who tilled the broad acres of a 
master, and struggled in vain to stand up in the dignity of man¬ 
hood. 

Let it not be supposed that I have forgotten the theme with 
which I started, in thus recalling the reminiscences' of a people’s 
history from whom we love to trace our descent. My purpose 
has been to present before you the comparative condition of a 
people with and one without the use of the mechanic arts, and to 
show you the tradesman of the England of our ancestors, cringing 
and trembling in the presence of some haughty noble, in contrast 
with the Brunels and Arkwrights and Stephensons of our day, 
earning the spurs of their knighthood,—the courted companions 
and counsellors of Peers and Cabinets. 

At the very time, moreover, of which I have been speaking, 
and for a long time previous, while this gloom of the middle 
ages was yet resting upon England, there were cities, just across 
the Channel, where wealth and luxury and refinement had a home, 
and the germs of free thought had been springing up, till the 
condition of the citizen had become an object of the jealousy 
and envy of royalty itself. 

Bruges and Ghent were crowded with mechanics and trades¬ 
men and merchants, and the style to which their citizens had at¬ 
tained, a century before the period to which I have confined 
my remarks, is best illustrated by the fretful confession of 


9 


wounded vanity, on the part of the Queen of France, 
while on a visit to these cities. “I had thought,” said she, 
“ to have been the only Queen here, but I find there are many 
hundreds more.” 

Nor is it difficult to detect a philosophical reason for this 
difference between these two people, though separated only by 
a narrow strait. It may be traced to the difference in their 
pursuits, and to the presence of the mechanic arts in the one, 
and their absence from the other. 

History tells us that it was in the cities and boroughs and 
communities of men that the human mind first begun to act, at 
the revival of letters in Europe. And if we inquire who it was 
that congregated together in tliese early bodies politic, we shall 
find it was not the soldiers, nor the tillers of the soil, but the 
mechanics and tradesmen, whose ties of sympathy and communi¬ 
ty of interests bound them together to resist oppression. Nor 
is it doing injustice to any other class, to assert that there is 
something in the very exercise of inventive powers and me¬ 
chanic skill which quickens the intellect, and keeps its facul¬ 
ties vigorous and active. Such pursuits rarely degenerate into 
a dull and monotonous routine, where, as in some departments of 
labor, the mind grows torpid. And when to all this we add that 
active sense of self-protection which men with a common purpose 
could hardly fail to cherish in a free and familiar intercourse with 
each other, it is not difficult to see why the manufacturers of the 
Netherlands should have gained a long start in the career of 
social independence, of the serfs and field-laborers of the coun¬ 
tries where Feudalism still prevailed. 

But perhaps a more powerful agency even than this, in break¬ 
ing down the institutions of feudalism, was the production and 
multiplication by mechanism, commerce, and art of those objects 
of comfort and luxury, which, in time, became the necessaries for 
2 


10 


which the baron and the landholder were willing to barter away 
their pride and their possessions, and come down to mingle in 
the affairs of trade and active business. 

Accordingly, even in England, and as early as the days of the 
Saxons, her mechanics had begun to associate for mutual protec¬ 
tion, under what were called Gilds , some of which have been 
maintained to the present day. 

With the acquisition of wealth, which an industrious pursuit of 
any of these trades was calculated to promote, birth, came in 
time to be less and less regarded, and labor lost much of the 
stigma which had once been attached to most employments 
but that of arms, till, at last, wealth and physical power, no 
matter how they had been earned, became associated in the 
public mind with dignity and influence, and commerce and the 
arts took their places among the occupations which were count¬ 
ed worthy to engage the English hand and the English brain, 
and England became, indeed, in no invidious sense, a nation of 
shop-keepers. 

Fortunately, this struggle in the mother country had been so 
far accomplished when our fathers came to New England, that 
they had little occasion to renew it here. Coming, as they did, 
from the middling classes of society, to whom labor had no 
terror, and compelled, as they were, from the necessity of their 
condition, to share in the toil and hardships of a new settle¬ 
ment, they had no false pride to overcome, nor prejudices to 
surmount, in order to be reconciled to such a lot. 

Mechanical labor, moreover, from the first, took a command¬ 
ing position in the scale of honorable pursuits proportioned 
to its importance, and the tradesmen who settled in the vari¬ 
ous towns shared liberally in the perils, as well as the bur¬ 
dens and the honors of the young communities. 

There never has been any occasion for the mechanics of 


11 


New England to associate and combine together to guard their 
rights from popular invasion, or to secure a fair share of 
popular power. That men, having a common pursuit, should 
regard each other with peculiar interest, and be ready to as¬ 
sociate for a common object, is a principle of human nature it¬ 
self. Accordingly, we find in the early progress of the Revolution, 
before public sentiment had become omnipotent, by becoming 
united, the blacksmiths, for instance, of a county coming together, 
and solemnly pledging themselves not to trade with or work 
for the obnoxious Tories or mandamus counsellors of that day, 
and, in that way, as a mechanic association, making themselves 
sensibly felt in the opening contest in which the country was 
about to engage. 

But it remained for the association which I am now honored 
in addressing, to be the first to unite in a permanent organiza¬ 
tion in our country, for the noble purposes of humanity and 
brotherhood, “ promoting,” in the language of its constitution, 
“ mutual good offices and fellowship, by assisting the necessitous, 
encouraging the ingenious, and rewarding the faithful.” It 
leaves, as it ought, each member to work out for himself his 
own social rank and condition, while it combines its energy and 
its influence in the unselfish offices of charity and good fellow¬ 
ship. 

It would, indeed, have been doing injustice to the memory of 
their own past history, to have resorted to such an organization 
for the purpose of affecting their social position. With the 
story of the Revolution still fresh, and the names of Franklin 
and Paul Revere, of Green and Bigelow and of Roger Sherman, 
familiar to every one, it would have been a work of puerile 
supererogation for them to have combined to secure, for mechani¬ 
cal labor, the respect of the New England mind. 

It is not within the scope of my subject to speak of the charity 


12 


that has relieved the widow, fed and clothed the orphan, and 
lent a helping hand to a brother struggling with adversity. It is 
to the part which this association has taken and must hereafter 
take, in the wider field of honorable industry, on which the 
prosperity of New England must rest, that the line of my re¬ 
marks leads me. 

If I were to select from the high purposes avowed in the 
preamble of its constitution, I would say a single word of that 
which relates to the encouragement of mechanical ingenuity. 

It has, sometimes, seemed as if men were eager to forget the 
right of the inventor to be protected in the fruits of his ingenui¬ 
ty and skill. If a man robs another of the corn that springs 
up in his field, or the fruit that drops from his tree, he does so, 
not only at the peril of the law, but of the reprobation of honest 
men. But if, after months and years of patient study and thought, 
the inventor perfects a useful machine, his reward has too often 
been either a determined hostility on the part of the operatives 
whose labor it was designed to facilitate, or a disposition on the 
part of those who are to be benefited by it, to pirate the in¬ 
vention or evade it, without a feeling of reproach at such an act 
of injustice, or of sympathy for the ruined hopes of the man 
who has thus been robbed. 

England as well as our own country is full of illustrations of 
this discreditable indifference to the claims of genius and skill. 

England is richer, by untold millions, by the spinning-mule of 
Crompton, who was suffered to die in poverty, surrounded by 
the wealth and luxury which his invention had earned for others. 
Whitney saw his claims rejected and his rights denied, by states 
and individuals to whom his invention had brought uncounted 
wealth and vast political power. Fitch and Evans and Fulton 
had to look to posterity for the recompense of a lifelong strug¬ 
gle of genius with adverse circumstances. And who has not 


13 


himself seen the patient, careworn mechanic, struggling to give 
being to the conceptions of his brain, oppressed by poverty and 
disheartened by indifference and neglect ? 

That instances like these call for the generous sympathy of 
liberal minds, I have no need of urging before such an associa¬ 
tion. That the American brain is teeming with inventions in the 
useful arts, the records of the Patent Office give ample evidence. 
That it has been usefully and most successfully employed, needs 
no other proof than a walk through your exhibition-rooms to-day. 
The fruits of genius and skill, of that mighty power which has 
been elevating and improving the condition of man, meet one 
here on every side, from that little angel of the household which 
robs domestic life of half its discomforts, and brings rest to 
tired fingers and aching eyes, while it goes on stitching 

“ Seam and gusset and band, 

Band and gusset and seam,” 

and turns the sad u song of the shirt ” of other days into pleas¬ 
ant romance, to that Leviathan whose giant power the tiny hand 
of a child may guide, though in tireless energy it does the labor 
of a thousand hands, and mocks at the tempest as it goes forth 
in triumph on its mission of commerce and civilization. 

There is, however, a broader field than this open before you. 

Of the many difficult problems which present themselves to the 
minds of reflecting men, there is, perhaps, no one more difficult to 
solve, as a matter of political economy or social duty, than the 
true relation between Capital and Labor. If it is ever to be 
solved, it must obviously be done by men of practical sagacity, 
rather than by theorizer3 and speculative abstractionists. 

I do not say that it is your duty to do this, or that it can be 
done by any one. But sure I am, that if ever the problem is 
solved, it must be by men situated just as you are, who have prac¬ 
tically filled both capacities of capitalist and laborer, of master 


14 


and man, and know the difficulties and embarrassments which 
stand in the way of each. 

The complaint has been repeated a thousand times, that capi¬ 
tal carries off the lion’s share of what labor has produced. And 
in the old world, this has too often been true. Capital, there, 
has been so far concentrated within a comparatively few hands, 
that it has had altogether the advantage of labor, which, by being 
overstocked, is always competing with itself, and compelled, 
thereby, to accept the lowest rate of compensation at which life 
could be sustained. 

The evil, moreover, has been one which has gone on perpet¬ 
uating itself by forcing the operation to forego the opportunity 
for study or intellectual culture, in the constant struggle by 
which alone he has been able to supply his animal wants. And 
thus unable to rise above the condition of dependence, he has 
left his children to renew an unequal contest with the very 
wealth that feeds them. The pictures which have so often been 
presented to us, of the condition of the working classes in the 
mining and manufacturing districts of England, have shown us 
what are the fruits of such an unequal division of profits be¬ 
tween the few who furnish the capital and the many whom it 
employs. With the one, wealth has been going on doubling and 
quadrupling, while with the other, its gains have rarely been 
sufficient even in the periods of prosperity, to carry the working 
classes through the seasons of adversity which are sure, at times, 
to follow those of success. The consequence has been that 
beggary and want have crowded the almshouse as often as em¬ 
ployment has failed, or a period of scarcity has forced up the 
prices of the necessaries of life. 

There is little use, however, even there, in sitting down to 
deplore this state of things; and, fortunately, there is rarely, if 
ever, any occasion, in our country, to indulge in lamentation 


15 


over the sufferings of unfed or unemployed operatives who are 
willing to work. 

Much less is there any practical utility in reading homilies to 
employers, for not paying high wages, when labor is plenty at 
low rates in market. While to seek redress under the instiga¬ 
tion of desperation or revenge, by compelling employers to pay 
uniform or arbitrary prices by means of organized strikes, is 
seen, in a vast majority of cases, to recoil upon the heads of 
those for whose pretended benefits they were originated. 

Capital, in such a case, has the decided advantage of labor in 
the contest. That may cease to draw its profits while unem¬ 
ployed, but labor, in such a contigency, not only ceases to earn 
profits, but is compelled to consume what it may have already 
reserved, and to become every day less able to maintain the 
struggle. And even if, as is sometimes the case, the strike 
finds some employer unable to stand up against it, and he is 
crushed, while his neighboring capitalists maintain their integrity, 
the effect is to diminish the demand for labor, and lessen the 
chance of coercing them to yield to terms. And if we may sup¬ 
pose the most favorable circumstances for such a strike and the 
employers, as a class, are driven to pay wages beyond what the 
market will return to them in the form of prices for their goods, 
they must, in the end, stop work altogether, or, what is more 
likely, taking advantage of the fluctuations which attend every 
business, they will, in the end, remunerate their losses by ex¬ 
actions made at times, when the operative, in turn, is obliged to 
yield. And thus, an unnatural war is carried on between the 
employer and employed, whose interests ought to harmonize and 
be identical. 

This, as I have said, is far from being a new question, either 
in economy or morals. It has engaged the earnest study of 
profound thinkers, the vagaries of idle dreamers, and the specu¬ 
lations of impracticable theorizers, some of whom have under- 


taken to lay down rules and canons for settling the rights of 
capital and labor, which read much better on paper than they 
work in practice. 

Among these theorists, have been the famous St. Simon of 
France, and his still more famous countryman, Fourier, whose 
vagaries have found earnest advocates, even on this side of the 
'water. 

The theory upon which they rested their system of reform, 
was, that the evils of society grow out of its original bad organ¬ 
ization, and this reform was to consist in carrying out the idea 
that u to each man there should be a vocation according to his 
capacity, and to each capacity a recompense according to its 
work.” 

What a hubbub and confusion would there be witnessed in this 
world of *ours, if such a theory were to be once adopted! 
What a bubbling and seething in this great social caldron in 
which we are all afloat, if every man was consigned to just the 
vocation to which his capacity fits him! How many a pulpit 
would be vacated, and bar thinned of its members ? How many 
a politician, now on the crest of the wave of popularity, would 
find himself and his patriotism floundering together in the mire, 
while names, unknown to fame, would be enrolled among the 
prudent counsellors and honest statesmen, whose memories 
brighten in the light of history ? 

Another part of this theory was, after appropriating enough of 
the products of a common industry to supply each citizen with 
his ordinary wants, to distribute the surplus so as to give to 
Labor Jive , to Capital four , and to leave three parts, only, for 
Talent. 

But a theory of socialism, visionary, even for Paris, with its 
250,000 work-people dependent on their daily wages for their 
daily bread, could, obviously, never be carried out in such a 
country as ours. And the problem is still unsolved. 


17 


One thing must be true. If, in a country like ours, labor, in 
any" department, fails to find remunerative employment, for any 
considerable length of time, in an ordinary state of consumption 
and production, it must be because some mistake lias been made 
in the proportions into which it should be divided. Everybody 
cannot get a living by making shoes, or watches, or hats, any 
more than everybody could get rich by turning lawyers, or 
doctors, or railroad engineers. 

There is a certain amount of shoes and machinery and cotton 
cloth, required to supply the market, varying, of course, at dif¬ 
ferent times, and, whenever this is supplied, if any new producer 
presses int.o these departments of labor, he helps to create an 
over-supply, and either he or some other workman must stop 
work, or they must together take up with what one had been re¬ 
ceiving before. 

We are told that it was such a state of things as this which 
led to the strike in the Leather business, which made so much 
noise, in our vicinity the last year. I have no occasion to sit in 
judgment upon the right or the wrong involved in the contro¬ 
versy. But it does not require a philosopher to understand 
that it m st be a measure of doubtful expediency, to say the 
least, to throw away the earnings of one’s hard toil and the 
chance of even a poor compensation, in time to come, upon 
public demonstrations of dissatisfaction aud discontent. Nor 
is it any less clear that if a poor workman insists upon being 
paid as high price and as much money as one who is skilful, it 
must operate to throw into the hands of the better workmen 
the monopoly of employment. 

This is the more important as a hint to the operatives of our 
country, from the facility with which every man of tact and in¬ 
genuity adapts himself to almost any condition of trade and 
handicraft. The system of apprenticeship, once common in New 
3 


18 


England, has pretty much disappeared before the progress of 
Young America, and the ready knack with which her young men 
turn their hands to any sort of business, in the shortest possible 
time, is sure to furnish a supply wherever a demand arises. 
Lawyers come out, full-fledged, on two years’ study, which, 
twenty-five years ago, it required from five to seven to produce. 
And whether the call be for a man to lay out a railroad, to make 
shoes, to settle Kansas, or to occupy Pike’s Peak, there are 
never wanting enough, who ask only time in which to pack up a 
spare shirt or a dicky, to start for the land’s end, if need be, 
ready to engage in the job. 

It is hardly necessary to say that whether this facility is 
favorable or not to the improvement of our mechanics in the 
science and skill of their various trades, in a country where, 
thank Heaven, Capital does not own Labor, it cannot fail to 
counteract, in some measure, the success of anything like com¬ 
binations to force up wages, by its creating a supply that will 
bring down prices, by the very competition which high wages are 
sure to create. 

I would not have dwelt upon the subject of capital, and labor, 
and wages, if it did not seem to address itself to the very spirit 
of your Association, which seeks to do justice, while it promotes 
an enlightened charity and a generous benevolence. 

I would, in this connection, have added a single word upon the 
inadequacy and disproportion of compensation paid to female 
labor in our country, as well as of the fields of employment 
which ought to be opened to that sex, from which they are now 
practically shut out. But I am compelled to hasten to the con¬ 
sideration of another and: a broader field of duty than any to 
which I have referred. I mean that of giving to Labor its true 
position, and investing it with the dignity which intrinsically 
belongs to it, as well as of elevating and enfranchising it, so far 


19 


as example can do it by a reflected influence upon the nations of 
the old world. 

It is to combat errors of opinion, and not to flatter the pride 
of any one, that I approach this subject. 

Ever since labor was imposed upon the race, a large pro¬ 
portion of them have regarded it as a burden which each felt at 
liberty to throw upon some other than himself. This led to the 
institution of servitude all over the East. And the same was 
true of the nations of Europe, wherever feudalism prevailed, 
giving to labor a social position from which it did not rise, even 
when villenage had been, nominally, abolished. It had, in fact, 
been so long associated with the idea of dependence and abase¬ 
ment, that a repugnance to it became, as it were, an instinctive 
feeling with all who could escape it. 

The contrast between this state of feeling and a more rational 
sense of independence which associated itself with free and in- 
. telligent labor, is seen by a comparison between the fens and 
morasses and half-tilled fields, the comfortless dwellings, the ill- 
fed people, and general poverty of vassal England, with the 
garden-like culture, the crowded cities, the comfortable homes, 
and boundless resources of the free England of the loom and the 
spindle and the work-shop, of our day. 

Yet with all this contrast, labor, even there, is but half eman¬ 
cipated. With all the terms of arrogant and self-righteous 
reprobation in which her philanthropists and politicians de¬ 
nounce an institution which, bad as it is, their ancestors,, entailed 
upon subject colonies, the laborer is kept dotoi beneath the 
crushing weight of existing institutions. Labor has not only had 
to struggle with capital, but with a far more potent law of social 
organization which throws so many impediments in the way of 
the laborer, whenever he attempts to rise above the condition to 
which he is born, and to which he is trained till hope and am¬ 
bition are crushed out of his nature. 


20 


The social evils of slavery do not grow out of the labor which 
is' imposed upon it, but from the ignorance,, the abject de¬ 
pendence and degradation as a class, in which involuntary labor 
must be kept, to maintain it at all. Nor does it matter much 
whether this ignorance and dependence are imposed by law, or 
by a social condition where the cause that produces it is a moral 
one. If the State neglects to furnish the means of education for 
its children, and leaves its laboring classes with no resources 
but their own labor which competition keeps down to almost a 
starvation price, how can she hope to see these classes rise 
above the condition to which they are born, of moral slavery, 
though politically free. 

It is, indeed, a great point gained that the barrier is a moral 
rather than a physical or political one; and it is cheering, too, 
to be told, as we are from time to time, that the state of things 
is improving there. Here and there, this barrier has not un- 
frequently been broken through, and the cotton spinner and the . 
mechanic have been able to mount up into the charmed circle of 
England’s gentle and noble blood. A traveller in England, in 
1847, thus speaks of some of these instances of success: “ Sir 
Robert Peel is said to be one of the richest commoners in En 
land, and this estate he inherited from his father, who amassed 
it by cotton-spinning. In Manchester, I passed three immense 
factories standing in a line, side by side, and containing, I doubt 
not, as many spindles as all the cotton factories in Lowell, and 
which, I^was informed, belonged to three Scotchmen, or their 
immediate descendants, who came to Manchester, some fifty years 
ago, with a single crown in their pockets.” 

But when we turn from this bright side of the picture, to the 
poverty, wretchedness, and debasement which are portrayed in 
the pages of Dickens, or Elliot, or Kingsley, into which so many 
of the toiling masses of England are sunk, in her mines, her 


21 


manufactories, and her workshops, we see the legitimate fruits 
of this unequal contest between capital and labor where the 
Government does so little to aid the weaker party, and the 
distance constantly widening between the few who own, and the 
many who till the soil, and tend the engines and spindles and 
looms of England. The great and crying injustice in all this is 
that after all the burdens which labor bears, in a hundred 
different forms, Government has heretofore cheated it out of the 
means of educating and fitting those who pursue it, for a better 
condition, and has hedged in the favored classes by arbitrary 
and artificial lines which few are able to surmount. 

We can better judge, perhaps, how far our own country has 
advanced in the right direction, if we turn a moment to the con¬ 
dition of labor upon the continent. 

France made a great and important step when she swept off 
the remnants of Feudalism within her borders in the storm of 
the revolution in 93. But in a country where the best blood 
and muscles of her sons are set apart for the camp, and woman 
is left to till the fields and do the drudgery of the farm, it is 
bitter mockery to speak of the dignity of labor or to treat of it 
as free. 

Italy, with her host of nobles too proud to work, but, not a 
few of them, not ashamed to beg, has been, as to the useful and 
practical arts, stagnant and stationary, while the fruits of honest 
labor have been eaten up by stout, healthy men, who, because 
labor was beneath their dignity, have been content to play 
monks, or priests, or pimps, in order to live in idleness and 
ease. 

Thank Heaven, a brighter day seems to be drawing on that 
lovely land, whose every stream, and mountain, and valley, is 
rich in the memories of classic and heroic times! A name is 
heard there, whose faroeHs bright even in the glory of her 

V\'' 


22 


ancient days, at the very sound of which the tyrant quails and 
flees away. And the cheerful morning sounds o& waking life are 
heard in the very streets and palaces of torpid, church-enveloped 
Eome. 

But I am in danger of losing sight of the purposes of these 
remarks, by delaying their application to our own more favored 
land. 

Is it not true that something remains yet to be done even 
here in New England, to give to labor its true position and just 
relation ? In a community where public sentiment is so potent, 
is there not something for the master mechanic, the manufacturer, 
and the employer, as well as the laborer himself to do, to give 
to this moral power a healthier and a more thoughtful tone ? 

No man speaks openly, it is true, in disparagement of those 
who toil in the workshop or the field; and it is a part of the 
small charge of politicians, at certain seasons of the year, to deal 
liberally in glowing eulogies upon labor. But if this is in 
reality the leading, prevailing sentiment in the community, why 
are so many eager and studious to find some mode of gaining a 
livelihood which does not bring with it the hard hands and 
bronzed visage of hard work ? Why are the professions 
crowded with indifferent preachers, fourth-rate lawyers, and 
M. D’s., authorized to do no good secundum artem? Or why is 
the country overrun with itinerant lecturers, and “ professors ” 
of all imaginable ologies , while stout bewhiskered representatives 
of the sex out of which mechanics are made, usurp the province 
which should be left to their more manly sisters, playing 
milliners, measuring tape, assorting worsted yarns, and arrang¬ 
ing and showing up for admiration, u Heaven save the mark 1 ” 
the wonderful network of a lady’s crinoline ? 

It is not merely because such men love their ease, or shrink 
from physical endurance, that they degrade themselves into the 


23 


foolish fancy that they are, thereby, getting above the level of 
labor. Many of those, who would as soon touch a torpedo as a 
spade, or be shocked into hysterics by the dust and din of a 
smith’s shop, would trudge all day, with a gun in hand, and a 
dog for a leader, to circumvent a brace of harmless woodcocks, 
or tramp through mire and bushes, bitten by black flies, and 
stung by musquitoes, to capture half a score of infantile trout, 
whose youth and inexperience should have been their protection. 

The truth is, call a thing labor , and many a man will vote it 
irksome, and shun it as unbecoming his dignity; whereas, call 
the same thing pleasure, and he will go through it as if it were 
so, though it calls for a degree of endurance that a man would 
not think of imposing upon a hired day-laborer. 

It is hardly necessary to add that notions like these must 
somehow, be rectified, before men will be willing to call things 
by their right names, or act as if labor was not one of those 
necessary evils which a man endures, simply because he cannot 
escape it. And let me say, in passing, that no body of men ever 
had a more favorable field or more effective means for carrying 
on any great work of social reform such as is here contem¬ 
plated, than your own Association. The institutions necessary to 
aid in its accomplishment are already provided at your hand. 
Even the traditional pride of pedigree can operate but as a fee¬ 
ble barrier, in a community where scarcely a man who is known 
at all, would not show some implement of labor quartered with 
the arms blazoned on his escutcheon. Schools are the com¬ 
mon property of all. College honors have ceased to be monop¬ 
olized by what are called the learned professions, while the 
evidences of thrift and comfort and personal independence scat¬ 
tered all around us, are identified with the success which is 
crowning industry and systematic labor in every form. 

With mechanics in our town and city councils, in our legisla- 


24 


tures and in Congress,— with one of your own number 
worthily presiding over the interests and well-being of this 
noble city, whose charities are as broad as humanity, and whose 
enterprise, that feeds them, is as untiring as the wind that wafts 
her commerce, or the steam that moves her wheels,— here, sure- 
ly, if anywhere, may be successfully wrought out the great 
social problem of placing the honest pursuit of busy industry 
on the common level of a people’s respect. 

But I pass to another field, in respect to which I wish to speak 
of the influence of mechanics and the mechanic arts. But let me 
guard against any misunderstanding in what I propose to say. 
I trench upon no man’s ground as a politician; I address no 
man’s prejudices; I appeal to no man’s sympathies, nor do I 
acknowledge the shibboleth of any man’s party. 

We see existing among us the institution of involuntary labor, 
and who will say that its influence upon the great question of 
elevating and enfranchising labor, may not be properly discussed 
on an occasion like the present ? 

Unintelligent and uneducated labor is but a machine of one- 
man power. Compared in its efficiency with the force which it 
exerts when guided by intellect, it is like what we may remark 
any day, around our railroad stations, in the making up of trains 
for merchandise and freight. Some half a dozen men slowly and 
toilsomely push forward an empty car which, when loaded, with 
a score or two more and led on by the power of a single engine, 
goes sweeping across the country upon its iron track, as if the 
exercise of its power was a pastime. 

And yet, the work of growing and fitting for the mdrket one of 
the great staples of our country, is in many of its details carried 
on by this one-man-power machine, costly in its outlay, expensive 
in its support, and unsatisfactory in its product. 

But it is not its want of economy alone. Its worst phase is 


25 


in its effect upon labor itself, degrading it and unfitting it, in 
the eyes of the multitude, for the pursuit of free men, and, 
thereby, withdrawing from the productive industry of the coun¬ 
try, no inconsiderable proportion of its useful and effective 
power. 

Nor can anything short of a demonstration which people can 
see and apply for themselves, hope to convince these men of the 
practicability and respectability of substituting free labor that 
is paid, for involuntary service without pay. One may preach till 
he is hoarse, to unwilling ears, without making a single convert, 
while attacking the morality of an institution which has become 
traditional by toleration, and which, from the constantly ex¬ 
panding demand for its products, conceals its violation of the 
laws of economy, by the unnatural profits which circumstances 
enable it to earn. And they have, certainly, the reasonableness 
of the thought, as well as the analogies of the past, on their side, 
who regard it as one of the missions of mechanic labor and the 
mechanic arts to work out this very demonstration. 

Suppose some happy invention, like that of McCormic’s 
reaper for the grain States, could be reached for the benefit of 
those that grow cotton. Suppose some new Whitney or Ark¬ 
wright should devise some labor-saving process for planting and 
gathering or fitting'their staple for market, does not every one 
see that it would work a revolution in the character of labor in 
all that region ? A leading politician of the South expressed 
the true view of this matter two or three years ago, in the shop 
of a mechanic in New York, who was a manufacturer of machin¬ 
ery. He had made certain valuable improvements in the cotton 
gin, and was endeavoring to construct a machine that should 
gather as well as gin the planter’s crop. 

While thus engaged, the gentleman entered and soon became 
interested in the incomplete machine. “ And so,” said he to the 
4 


26 


mechanic, “ you too have turned abolitionist! ” u Oh no,” re¬ 
plied the latter, “ I leave other folks to settle their affairs, while 
I try to take care of my own.” “But,” said the man of cotton, 
“ don’t you see if ybu carry out your plan, you will kill off half 
our slaves at once ? Do you suppose a man is going to buy 
negroes when one of your Yankee machines will do more than 
a whole drove of them ? ” 

I have an impression that one such invention would do more 
towards settling the question of the finality of the Union than 
all the politicians in the land. And as the blacksmith of whom 
we are told, who had been slandered and was advised to sue the 
offender, was satisfied he could go into his shop and work out a 
character a great deal quicker than by chasing after one 
through the courts, so it is not extravagant to say that one good 
mechanic and his establishment, planted at a proper point, could 
do more, by the exercise of his skill at handicraft, to introduce 
sound and sober reason upon the points that divide the public 
mind, than half a dozen preachers who should content themselves 
with addressing the moral sense of the owners of some three or 
four thousand millions of dollars’ worth of what they call prop¬ 
erty, upon the enormity of continuing to hold it. 

It* manufacturing and the mechanic arts could once be intro¬ 
duced among the people there, the same consequences must fol¬ 
low, to a certain extent, at least, as have always followed the 
congregation of such operatives in villages and considerable 
communities. Churches would be gathered, schools would spring 
up, and the incidents and surroundings of such collections of free 
men, would, as a matter of course, develop themselves. And, 
let the character of field labor be what it might, for a while, in 
villages like these, no one would have occasion to hang his head 
while busy at his task. 

Nor let any man pronounce this idle or visionary, or suppose 


27 


because the thing looks dark and portentous now, that Provi¬ 
dence has no way of drawing off the elements of that fatal ex¬ 
plosion with which the clouds seem now to be charged. 

Does one suppose that, with the raw material at their doors, 
with water-power in abundance, and mineral resources of un¬ 
counted value, unemployed, the Plantation States are always to 
be content to have their coats and their shoes, their clothes and 
their farming tools, their cars and their engines, and the thou¬ 
sand articles of prime necessity manufactured abroad, and are 
always to depend for these upon the labor and ingenuity of 
other regions ? 

Establishments for these purposes have already been com¬ 
menced in different localities, and are in a further state of for¬ 
wardness than the art of cotton manufacture itself was in Eng¬ 
land seventy-five years ago. Intellectual labor in some of its 
departments has always been liberally rewarded and honored in 
that portion of our country, and what is there to prevent labor 
in any department which calls into exercise a corresponding 
skill, ingenuity, and intellectual power, from taking its place by 
the side of free thought and liberal learning ? How long 
would it take a series of communities like those of Waltham, or 
Worcester, or the Bridgewaters, made up of the people of that 
region, and scattered at different points through the South and 
Southwest, to live down the odium of labor, and build up a sound, 
practical, active sentiment, with the thrift and prosperity which 
such towns would be sure to foster with their growth? 

It was by such a process that the vassalage and serfdom of 
Europe was broken down, and white slavery, as a recognized 
institution, disappeared in Italy and England. The people 
grew free, not by outside violence, but by internal forces, and 
home-directed influences. 

I do not suppose you are going to put on your armor like 


28 


the red-cross knights of old, and go forth upon a crusade for 
free labor. But there is not one of you who may not do some¬ 
thing towards infusing into the public mind a sound and healthy 
sentiment upon this very subject of its becoming elevated and 
free, which only needs to become general, to be the harbinger 
of a brighter day for civil liberty, than any that has dawned 
since the old Thirteen declared themselves their own masters. 

I would not indulge in too sanguine hopes or extravagant 
fancies, as we look forward to the future of our country, in con¬ 
nection with the part which you and men like you are acting, in 
bringing about the changes that are to be wrought in the condi¬ 
tion of the race. But the mission which free mechanical labor 
has already performed, is but the earnest of what it is yet to 
accomplish. I look back upon the gloom and darkness of the 
middle ages, and I read in its history how light broke in through 
the cloud that had settled down over the nations. I see Schoeffer 
and Guttenberg setting in motion an engine, away back in the 
15th century, which is, at this day, busy in giving impulse to 
every movement of the human mind. I see a monk in his 
cell, combining that wonderful composition of elements so power¬ 
less in themselves, which gives to war the laws of science, and 
disarms it of half its horrors, which puts into the hand of man a 
power that conquers the inertness of matter, and opens up the 
highways of commerce and civilization. I look again, and I see 
the kindly instinct of art urging on while it is keeping pace with 
human progress, and supplying its ever-increasing wants. I 
see the Marquis of Worcester calling upon the subtle element of 
steam to work the mines of England; and Bolton and Watt 
developing from the same agency a working power, the limit of 
whose energy a century has not been able to measure. I see 
Arkwright starting his spinning-frame, just at the moment when 
without some such agent, England must have sunk beneath the 


29 


weight of hostile continental alliances. And when the commerce 
and intercourse of the world could no longer be adequately 
served without some new application of the forces of nature, 
Fulton comes forward to supply it upon the water, and Stephen¬ 
son, erelong, is doing the same thing upon its iron track, by 
land. 

And when, at last, a new sentient power was wanted for the 
world itself, having all the magic quickness of individual thought 
and perception, the Electric Telegraph, in the hands of Morse, 
starts into life at his bidding, to give, as it were, a single vital 
energy and activity to the millions that make up the busy, rest¬ 
less, and, hitherto, alien nations of the earth. 

I might pursue this illustration into the field of domestic com¬ 
fort and convenience, and economic utility, — to the machine 
that gins our cotton, mows our grass, threshes our grain, sews 
our shirts, and pegs our boots, but time forbids. 

As we contemplate the past, who is to say where are to be 
the limits of human invention, or beyond what bounds Art and 
Genius may not pass ? Or who can doubt that mechanism and . 
mechanic skill are to go forward, hand in hand, with whatever 
agency shall be employed to elevate, emancipate, and Christianize 
the human race ? 

This thought opens to the mind a still broader and nobler 
and holier field for the mission of the mechanic arts. We are 
on the eve of a half century jubilee of the Christian world since 
measures were inaugurated in our country, in an organized form, 
for carrying to the heathen world a knowledge of our Holy Re¬ 
ligion. Of the signal success of that enterprise, as it has been 
variously prosecuted by the several religious denominations 
which have taken part in it, it is unnecessary for me to speak in 
this presence. Language would be inadequate to do justice to 
the power of a written and preached gospel, in moulding, and 


30 


elevating, and* purifying the character of nations as well as of 
men. But when the light of Christianity and civilization shall 
have spread over the regions once given up to moral desolation, it 
will be found that, in the economy of divine Providence, other 
agencies than the abstract force of truth will have been at work 
in converting the debased Pagan into the civilized Christian. It 
will be because the arts, the comforts, and the sources of 
physical enjoyment, no less than the elements of cultivated 
thought, which go to make up an American home, had become 
necessary to them, by having been taught and exhibited among 
them. It will have been the plough that brought fertility to 
their fields, the spindle and the loom that clothed them in decent 
apparel, the comfortable dwelling that gave them shelter, and 
the enjoyment of what it cost them care and diligence and skill 
to cultivate, or manufacture, or obtain in the exchanges of com¬ 
merce, that created within them the tastes of refined Christian 
life and the amenities of enlightened Christian intercourse. In 
short, it will then be found that the arts, the possession of 
which distinguishes the condition of savage from civilized life, will 
have gone forward as the pioneers of that faith and worship of 
the true God which carries social refinement and civil liberty in 
its train. 

But my time forbids my pursuing this thought any farther. 
And it only remains for me to again remind you that these arc 
some of the relations in which, as members of this association, 
you and the pursuits in which you are engaged, stand to the 
world, its history and its hopes. See to it, that in your hands 
art loses none of its sanctity, and labor none of its dignity or 
its honorable rewards. 

The exhibition which we have been witnessing of the varied 
skill of the artisan, in the halls which this occasion has crowded 
with works of utility and beauty, is but an earnest of the onward 


31 


progress which our country is making in the march of cultivation 
and improvement. But it is, if possible, of a deeper interest as 
an exhibition of artisans themselves, of the men whose brains 
conceived and whose hands executed these products of taste and 
genius and curious skill, and, above all, of the men who, in their 
own lives, and the success which they have achieved, have helped 
to dignify labor, and give to it that honorable position which it 
holds here to-night. 










































































































































































































































































































































































































































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